Role of media on New Religious Movements free essay sample

The media are significant actors in events leading to episodes of violence involving New Religious Movements since their emergence from the West in the 1960’s. The word cult has become associated with negative emotional connotations which made the public to have a general perception that it should be hated, feared or be avoided. The complexity of this subject has led scholars to abandon the popular term cult and agreed on a more neutral term New Religious Movements. In theology, cults are groups which deviate from traditional forms of Christian orthodoxy. Therefore, the writer is going to focus on the role of the media in public perceptions of New Religious Movements with special reference to some groups where violence has occurred. In this twenty first century, very few people are interested in NRMs that they seek out knowledge about them unless they have a specific interest in that area. They also never read any literature from them and neither do they make contact with the movements directly in order to learn more about them. Lack of information leads to misunderstandings and conflicts that affect the NRMs and all other things religious as society becomes more and more secular. Therefore, the media plays an important role in informing the public and it relies on it the mostly. The journalists are found to be the greatest cheats imaginable, they will disassemble, lie, sniffle and if possible overreach and defraud all who deal with them in order to qualify their acts and to be more secure. Therefore, what is portrayed and how it is portrayed has a great influence on forming public opinion. The NRMs quickly became controversial because they arrived at the same time and persuaded some people that a new invasion of the body snatchers had occurred. Secondly, the movements which drew on Asian philosophies and cultures tended to arouse suspicions merely for being foreign and therefore perceived as threatening. Thirdly, the people who were targeted by the new movements were mainly young, relatively well educated, middle-class students who were obviously not deprived. This means that their aggrieved relatives and former friends tended to have the money, connections and confidence required to make their complaints heard in centres of influence and power, at least at local levels. The list of complaints voiced against controversial NRMs grew so long that anti-cult organizations began to emerge in the early 1970s to combat what they considered to be a major menace to young people. Allegations of economic exploitation, mental cruelty, the deliberate alienation of recruits from their families, deceptive recruiting practices, harmful diets and life-styles, sexual abuse and, of course, brainwashing were widespread. The high-water mark of anti-cult feeling probably occurred in the late 1970s following the death of more than 900 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones at Jonestown, Guyana. This was also the period of the most rapid growth in membership of the most notorious cults. Therefore, given the secretiveness or defensiveness of most controversial cults, some journalists came to play a crucial role as go-betweens and arbitrators between NRMS, their members and angry outsiders. Only ex-members could rival the privileged position of a few investigative journalists; but most ex-members were understandably reluctant to talk freely about their former commitments. In these circumstances, the role of groups in the anti-cult movement has assumed significant proportions. Cult controversies cannot be properly understood unless the symbiotic relationship between these anti-cult groups and journalists is taken into account. Some anti-cult movements are not connected to any religion and do not criticize the NRM’s on the basis of their doctrines, but attack them from a legal, economic, psychological and political viewpoint. This means that what they do is easily understandable by the public and they are eager to pass on their information through the media. This disregard of the religious aspect makes the organisations seems more objective but in fact it allows for even more misunderstanding of something that is rooted in faith and spiritually. Their messages of human rights abuse, exploitation, mass suicide and violence frightens the people to an extent of seeking protection. An alliance between the ACM’s and journalists is obvious that, they need information that is appealing to their readers whilst the ACMs are eager to supply exactly just that to them. This enables the ACMs to send their message out and gain the publics’ support that will give them strong networks and become more powerful. The print and broadcast of media on NRMs is that the movements activities are newsworthy only when conflicts are involved. The articles and programmes of NRM mainly used conflict as the main occasion for the portrayal since most media organisations do not employ a specialist in religious topics. This means that any journalist available with little or no knowledge about a religion can cover any story that is newsworthy. Misunderstandings and confusion arise because of the journalist’s incorrect interpretations and assumptions. Media agencies are competitive commercial ventures because if a story comes out, they all want to release it first without giving it more time of research in order to avoid misleading the public. The most newsworthy stories are those that involve conflict and violence and therefore the ones that predominate in the media. The most tragedies and memorable have been the stories of Jonestown, the Branch Davidians at Waco, Heaven’s Gate, the Order of the Solar Temple and the Aum Shinrikyo. These stories of violence, murder, suicide and intrigue have left an impression that all cults are indeed destructive and dangerous. Stories about NRMs may not be frequent but they are reported in a very similar way. Repetition of the same themes has reinforced the public perception of them and has led to the NRM stereotype. The stereotypical cult is totalitarian, exploitative and destructive. Unfortunately this stereotype is based on the most controversial groups. The media have also failed to take into account the great diversity of the groups as well as the continually changing nature of religious groups. Journalists often add a summary of the negative characteristics of a NRM when reporting on a relatively isolated event. The journalistic construction of cult conflicts is that stories are frequently cross-referenced to other mass media items. TV programmes, for example, use still shots of newspaper and magazine headlines as devices for emphasising shock and horror. Similarly, the still photographs of cult leaders which are sometimes used in TV programmes are shown staring out of the pages of the print media. Presumably the intention is to try to enhance the sense of realism and veracity by showing that stories about a particular NRM or leader have already appeared in the print media and must therefore true. Since the information and images that are quoted in this way between different stories or media tend to be overwhelmingly, unflattering and critical, the effect is likely to reinforce the generally negative image of NRMs. In turn, this hardens public opinion against the movements and fuels the anti-cult campaigns. An allied feature of reporting cult-related conflicts in which the journalists have difficulty gaining access to relevant material is that they tend to substitute their own operation for the ostensibly central subject. This was especially clear in the case of Waco where access to the Branch Davidian compound was denied to journalists. The focus of many stories therefore became the media circus on the compounds perimeter. The fact that so many journalists were present seemed to guarantee the importance of the event at moments when nothing significant seemed to be happening. Writing stories about the stories being written by other journalists took the place of direct reports on the siege of the Branch Davidians. Perhaps this practice also helps journalists to cope with the competition for customers between different programmes. They can keep a story running despite the lack of directly relevant material which leaves the public with a very one-sided view. This will even lead social control agents no option but to be seen responding. Journalists function as the principal gatekeepers of public opinion especially on matters with which the person-in-the-street is not normally familiar. Their overwhelmingly critical portrayal of the movements can therefore contribute indirectly towards the latters control. Indeed, as many informed commentators on the debacle at Waco have pointed out, the FBI, the US Department of Justice, journalists and programme maker all tended to favour the testimony of psychological experts whose anti-cult views were well known in advance. One of the many scandalous aspects of the whole affair was the studied refusal to give credence to the testimony of sociological, anthropological, historical and theological experts on controversial NRMS. It is unlikely that any of these scholars with first-hand experience of researching these movements in their natural settings over many years would have supported the strategy and tactics adopted by the Bureau of Arms, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) and the FBI. Instead, credence was selectively given to opinions rooted in individualistic abnormal psychology. This is always newsworthy, as was shown by the fascination with the psychological condition of David Koresh. Legislators and police officials in particular find themselves under pressure to say what they intend to do about the alleged wrongdoing and outrages perpetrated by cults. Journalists seem not to be interested in the specific circumstances which led to such spectacular disasters. Instead, all the emphasis is on the presumed and unquestioned resemblance between the Peoples Temple or the Branch Davidians and cults in the UK. The authorities are forced to respond to these leading questions and are not given the opportunity to express doubts or reservations about the practice of putting all cults together. This dramatisation of the situation increases public nervousness and official defensiveness, neither of which is conducive to clear thinking and fairness. There is a danger, then, that inadvisable, panic reactions may follow. In the case of the Branch Davidians, for example, the ante at Waco was upped because of the intervention of television reporting. Lives were endangered because the story line was created and embedded in a pernicious dualism which legitimated the authorities and discouraged unconventional perspectives and opinions. The shared mentality-the corporate mentality-was served as the cultural mainstream reinforced and not challenged. Wacos Branch Davidians, then, were victims of a media-induced disaster, executed before the eyes of the nation on television. The polarisation that led to the catastrophe at Waco was inherent in neither the religious group itself-nor even in the FBI. Numerous commentators have blamed the Editor of the Waco Tribune-Herald for running the full episode of a hard-hitting expose of the Branch Davidians immediately prior to the BATFs assault on the compound. This allegedly broke an agreement with the BATF to withhold publication; and it probably forced the Bureau to take its ill-conceived action earlier than it had intended. On the other hand, it seems that the FBI placed considerably tighter restrictions on journalists covering the siege than is normal in similar events. In other words, the trade-off between journalists and authorities worked to the greater advantage of the latter. Not enough attention has been given to the consequences of sensationalist depictions of religion in a secular age. Journalists fascination with the tragedies of Jonestown and Waco stemmed not only from the exotic and improbable details of the two communitys ways of life but also from the suspicion that the cult controversies were only the tip of the iceberg. Investigative journalists had a field day with their inquiries into the possibility either that people in authority had bungled the operations to prevent loss of life and/or that attempts had been made afterwards to cover up the errors made by the forces of order. In other words, cult-related conflicts could be connected with broader concerns about the use and misuse of state power. Other examples of stories linking cults with conflicts against the state include the bombing by police of the anarcho-ecology group, MOVE, in Philadelphia; the killing by police in 1983 of all six followers of Lindberg Sanders, a self-styled Black Jesus, in a shoot-out in Memphis; and various armed assaults on dissident Mormons in Utah. The result is usually a polarisation of journalistic and public opinion between, on the one hand, the view that agents of the state acted negligently and on the other, the view that the same agents should have acted more decisively to suppress the movement in question before the problem had become unmanageable by peaceful means. But both cases illustrate the more general point that it is invariably the conflicts associated with NRMs which make them newsworthy even when responsibility for the conflicts is attributed to the state. An interesting twist on this theme quickly emerged in European print-media accounts of Waco. The long and slow-moving story of the siege provided an opportunity for journalists to investigate in depth the issues of gun ownership and control in the USA. In fact, the amount of attention devoted to this context of the action taken against the Branch Davidians sometimes outweighed reports of events at Waco. The dangerous image of cults was thereby reinforced by linking them with a separate conflict about firearms. One conflict was nested whilst the negative view of NRMs goes very much unchallenged by the public. Conclusion The mass media characterised the movements as threatening, strange, exploitative, oppressive and provocative. A content analysis of selected British print-media between 1975 and 1985 showed how this sensationalist approach helps to cement the public perception of cults as, at best, weird and, at worst, destructive and there is a strong confirmation of this analysis from the USA. On the other hand, it is clear that the reasons for the biased presentation of NRMs in the mass media are rooted in commercial pressures, cultural stereotypes and the lack of time for journalists to take a more nuanced and longer-term view of the movements. It should also be recognised that some journalists have exposed the criminal activities of a few cult leaders and have therefore been helpful in checking abuses. Indeed, the public is heavily dependent on the mass media for information about unconventional and sometimes secretive religious movements. The public is right to expect that journalists should be more methodical, discriminating, careful and open-minded than they normally are when it comes to, portraying NRMS. Their knee-jerk categorisation of the movements as problematic and dangerous is not only prejudiced and lazy but it also feeds directly into public ignorance and a less than even-handed attitude towards the movements on the part of social control agencies. The cosy relationship that many journalists have with the ACM can be an excuse for them not to do their research properly. BIBLIOGRAPHY